LED lighting may generally provide advantages in energy conservation, environmental protection, controllable lighting, solid state lighting, and long operational lifetime. LED lighting devices thus have been widely used in various areas for public, commercial, and indoor lighting.
There has been an increasing focus on precise positioning and navigation to places of interest. Positioning technologies such as global positioning system (GPS), cellular base positioning, and Wi-Fi hotspot positioning have been commonly used.
The GPS technologies use signals sent from satellites that are evenly distributed and surrounding the earth to achieve precise positioning in an open outdoor environment. GPS signals can provide global coverage and work at any time of the day. GPS signals are used in a wide range of applications with high accuracy. For each positioning operation, however, GPS processor needs to search GPS satellite signals that are currently available (generally involving at least three or more satellites) and then calculate accurate position information using related signal processing programs and algorithms. It often takes a long time for a system to accurately position a device when GPS technologies are used, which, as a result, requires high power consumption. In addition, GPS satellite signals may be blocked by high-rise buildings and ceilings of rooms. GPS technologies thus cannot be effectively used in an indoor environment or in an area having buildings with high density.
Mobile operators often use widely-distributed cellular base stations. The cellular base stations may have a limit for signal propagation up to several kilometers. Each base station has its unique encoding information and precise location information. Therefore, whether it is indoor or outdoor, the base station technologies may perform positioning operations using received data of precise location information (corresponding to the unique encoding of the base station) and signal strength for calculations. Compared with GPS technologies, the base station technologies may take less time for positioning. However, significant inaccuracies (e.g., in a range from a few hundreds to a few thousands meters) may occur. The accuracy of base station based technologies depends upon the distribution/coverage range of base stations, the radio propagation environment, the number of signals that the base station can receive, etc.
Wi-Fi signal itself does not provide any positioning or navigation ability. However, Wi-Fi router and hotspot module have features including: (a) a relatively-fixed position (rarely being moved); (b) a globally unique MAC (i.e., media access control) address for the processor; and (c) a relatively short Wi-Fi signal propagation distance.
Typically, the GPS location information, the encoding information of a base station of the mobile operator, and the MAC address information of a Wi-Fi hotspot may be automatically collected by a mobile device in an outdoor environment. Such non-processed location data may then be sent to a location server for further calculations and calibrations to provide accurate location information that can be sent back to the mobile device.
Compared with GPS and base station based technologies, positioning based on Wi-Fi hotspots may use less time and may provide high efficiency. In addition, precise position information of Wi-Fi hotspot may be stored in a database of the location server under a unique MAC address. When the mobile device performs indoor positioning operations again, even without GPS or base station positioning signals, location information in the location server corresponding to the MAC address of the Wi-Fi hotspot can be directly called in combination with signal strength of the received Wi-Fi signals to quickly perform the positioning operations. Wi-Fi hotspot technologies are suitable for positioning in a small area. Currently, the Wi-Fi hotspot technologies have been widely used in many applications/software products for a mobile device.
However, Wi-Fi wireless router is configured in a relatively fixed location with a signal transmission distance of tens or hundreds of meters. All mobile devices under the Wi-Fi signal coverage can only use location data that are previously saved on the location server by the corresponding Wi-Fi wireless router. In addition, the Wi-Fi hotspot technologies are restricted by the service range. Further, the Wi-Fi hotspot technologies cannot provide information regarding direction, speed, and/or other navigation data. Furthermore, the Wi-Fi hotspot technologies cannot be used offline.
Thus, there is a need to overcome these and other problems of the prior art and to provide systems and methods for indoor navigation control by LED lighting devices.